Forum preferences in North American trade dispute settlement: from regional to multilateral and back again
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter describes the political tides that have pushed North American trade dispute settlement preferences back and forth between multilateral and regional levels. The first section traces early approaches to the creation of a binding dispute settlement mechanism in the Canada–US Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This first era of forum shifting reflected the interests of Canada and Mexico in preferential access to the American market and the frustrations of the United States over the state of panel enforcement at the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The second section describes the move back to multilateralism. The North American partners negotiated a multilateral dispute settlement system at the new World Trade Organization (WTO) for different reasons. The US hoped to anchor the postwar liberal international order in reciprocity and law. Canada and Mexico wanted multilateral legal processes to reduce the potential for American noncompliance. The last section examines the most recent era of shifting preferences, in which the US has pulled back from dispute settlement at the WTO and renegotiated an updated regional agreement. Today, trade governance is framed by the exigencies of the Republican ‘America First’ foreign policy doctrine and the Democrats’ ‘Worker-Centered Trade Policy.’ Three recent cases offer a glimpse of the potential of the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA/CUSMA/T-MEC) for a legitimate and authoritative regional order for dispute settlement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".